John Geoghan

Who was John Geoghan?

John J. Geoghan was an American Roman Catholic priest who had numerous accusations of sex abuse made against him while he was assigned to parishes in the Boston Archdiocese of Massachusetts. He was reassigned several times to parish posts involving children, including after extensive treatment for pedophilia.

The investigation and prosecution of Geoghan was one of numerous cases of priests accused of sex abuse scandal that rocked the Archdiocese in the 1990s and 2000s. This led to the resignation of Boston's archbishop, Cardinal Bernard Francis Law, on December 13, 2002, as he was accused of protecting dozens of priests by reassignment, and allowing abuse of additional parish children to take place. He lost the support of his priests and laity. Geoghan was finally convicted of sexual abuse, defrocked, and sentenced in 2002 to nine to ten years in Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center, a maximum-security prison; less than a year later, he was murdered there by an inmate who is serving a life sentence.